Conversation

Charlotte 🩝 therian

rating european names for raccoon:

  • variations on an indigenous name for raccoon: good
  • wash bear: clearly have never seen raccoons in the wild
  • szop/ĆĄup: you guys really need to put down the telephone alright
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szop/ĆĄup is so funny because like

it’s so obvious that it comes from fur trade with poor understanding

it derives from the german word Schupp which is very obscure and refers to the fur of a raccoon

However it derives from the russian word шуба which means fur coat which implies that at some point a german fur trader asked what a raccoon fur coat was and they answered with “fur coat” and that then became the name of the fur

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@charlotte in a similar vein, I heard that the name of the tree "spruce" most likely comes from "z Prus" which is "from Prussia" (what used to be a Germanic country/empire by the Baltic sea)

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@charlotte what do you mean wash bear is very accurate

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@charlotte Germany is full of wild raccoon, and they get the name waschbÀr because they wash their food before eating

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@charlotte But wasbeer sounds so cute, and they do wash their paws after digging in the trash? ;P

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@Jonly it’s a behavior raccoons primarily perform in captivity. wild raccoons don’t typically wash their food

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@charlotte uh thats disappointing
they should do that tho

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@Jonly i mean to be specific, if the raccoon catches food in water they will scrub it to remove unwanted parts but they do that regardless of whether the food is wet

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@Jonly the dousing behavior is mostly seen in captive raccoons because they typically have their foods very close to their watering hole

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@Violet iirc the dousing is mostly a thing captive raccoons do, as for wild raccoons the food is already submerged in water or not found near water

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@charlotte as far as i'm aware they still do dip things in rivers/lakes

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@Violet fwiw the raccoon was named in german before they escaped containment/were released. waschbÀr was likely a description of their behavior in captivity

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